I am a political scientist and a member of the interdisciplinary Law and Society scholarly community. My scholarship has, since 2010, followed two tracks – with a newly-emerging third track. The first track continued my career-long investigation into how modern American conservatives employ “rights talk” to articulate their dominant political visions. This track of scholarship: resulted in the publication of two peer-reviewed articles in one of the premier Law and Society journals for qualitative research (Law, Culture, and the Humanities – a journal that qualitatively-inclined Political Scientists rank 6^th out of a pool of 95 peer-reviewed law journals and which is, in fact, the top-ranked of those 95 journals that specifically features scholarship that sits at the intersection of the social sciences and the humanities, as does my scholarship[1]); was supported by a year-long faculty fellowship at the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute; and culminated in the 2017 publication by Stanford University Press of a well-reviewed, award-winning monograph entitled Raised Right: Fatherhood in Modern American Conservatism.
The second scholarly track offered interventions into the general state of Law and Society scholarship, especially with respect to the enduring topics of legal mobilization and the “politics of rights.” These interventions led to the publication of two high-profile peer-reviewed essays: a solo-authored piece in a special issue of the research annual Studies in Law, Politics, and Society that honored the intellectual legacy of Stuart Scheingold; and a co-authored piece with Michael McCann and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller for which I was lead author and that appeared in 2015’s The Handbook of Law and Society.
My 2017 book Raised Right continued my career-long, interdisciplinary exploration of the centrality of law and rights to the rise and contemporary practice of modern American conservatism – an exploration that I began in my 2008 monograph The Cultivation of Resentment (Stanford University Press). The publication of Raised Right was preceded by multiple peer-reviewed journal articles in Law, Culture, and the Humanities (LCH) and a non-peer reviewed, but highly-visible bibliographic essay in the American Library Association’s Choice magazine that allowed me to articulate a gap in the extant historical scholarship. As ably as that scholarship traced the motley coalition of groups and interests that make up modern American conservatism, it offered no obvious understanding of how that coalition had, over the course of six decades, consistently overcome its internal tensions and staved off implosion. What conviction(s) could be so compelling that the power of shared belief in them would allow apparently irreconcilable groups (small-government libertarians, racial and gender traditionalists, free market acolytes, and evangelical Christians) to so successfully gild their fractious tendencies?
My answer to these questions was hinted at in my 2012 and 2016 LCH articles, and then developed in full in Raised Right. These works argue that the major unifying belief of modern American conservatism – the most important thing that American conservatives believe in – is that individual rights define the American experience and that those rights can be exercised legitimately only by citizens who have been reared according to a very particular family dynamic, one that maximizes paternal authority and minimizes maternal authority. Such families, according to modern American conservatives both prominent and ordinary, are the seedbeds for growing properly disciplined and self-governing citizens who can be trusted later in life to exercise their rights in a responsible manner. The existence of such citizens allows for limited government, because self-discipline mitigates the need for external authority. Conversely, improperly reared citizens, those raised without strong fathers, tend to lack self-discipline and responsibility; their behaviors, especially their exercises of rights, are dangers to the American nation. Accordingly, the subversive threats presented by citizens who were not “raised right” must be combatted with aggressive and overbearing governmental authority – authority that stands-in for the strong fathers who were absent during childhood. Spoken compulsively, this “paternal rights discourse” gives American conservatives something to believe in; it spawns a political vision that emphasizes limited, permissive government for esteemed citizens, on one hand, and aggressive, punitive government for disreputable citizens, on the other hand. And because prominent conservative icons such as William F. Buckley, Jr., Ronald Reagan, and Clarence Thomas (and, as I argued in a pair of non-peer reviewed 2017 essays, Donald Trump himself) obsessively speak it, believe in it, and employ it to present themselves as prototypical, self-disciplined progeny of America’s strong fathers (either its real, biological fathers or its mythical, founding fathers), the paternal rights discourse also gives modern American conservatives someone to believe in.
But the effects of the paternal rights discourse are ambivalent. In addition to providing modern American conservatives with a political vision that fosters belief in paternal authority and its foremost spokespersons, the paternal rights discourse also presents a paradox – one that points to the basic incoherence of its theory of family development. Fidelity to paternal will stands for external domination and submission; Enlightenment theories of individual rights gesture, instead, to self-determination and autonomy. Yet the paternal rights discourse celebrates both the undying influence of American fathers and the mature autonomy of American children. And this is curious. For, if American fathers must always be authoritative, then how can their children ever become the autonomous, rights-bearing citizens of conservative lore?
This paradox, Raised Right argues, is foundational to modern American conservatism’s paternal rights discourse; and, so, the tensions that it reveals and reinforces are inevitable. Its essential belief system resting upon unstable ideological and discursive ground, modern American conservatism produces not the autonomous, rights-bearing citizens that it promises but rather emotionally-fraught, anxious subjects who are trapped in an endless cycle of personal and political drama that plays out in the register of filial loyalty. Ultimately, through its case studies of the personal and political lives of William F. Buckley, Jr., Ronald Reagan, and Clarence Thomas, Raised Right finds that the paternal rights discourse, in spite of its unifying power, encourages modern American conservatives to engage in overwrought political behavior that is unnecessarily harsh, frequently incoherent, and, in the end, counter-productive to their stated goals.
Raised Right has been recognized in multiple ways, both prior to and following its publication. While the manuscript was still in development, I was awarded a year-long faculty fellowship at UConn’s Humanities Institute for the 2014-2015 academic year. Raised Right was then chosen for inclusion by Stanford University Press in its prestigious The Cultural Lives of Law book series. One of only 16 books published by SUP to be so included since 2005, the series features the scholarship of many Law and Society luminaries, including three former presidents of the Law and Society Association. Since publication, Raised Right has garnered a series of strong published reviews. In particular, it was the lead book in Politics & Gender’s review symposium for its special issue on “Gender and Conservatism” and was the subject of a prestigious “Critical Dialogue” exchange in Perspectives on Politics. In addition, the book: was honored with high-profile “Author-Meets-Readers” sessions at the 2017 annual meetings of the Law and Society Association and the American Political Science Association (it was one of only two books to be so honored that year by the Law and Courts section of APSA); led to invitations to deliver public addresses at Drake University and the University of Michigan; and has been the subject of multiple media interviews, in both print and audio form. Finally, Raised Right was selected for one of the only two Honorable Mention awards that were given for the Law and Society Association’s 2018 Herbert Jacob Book Award (which recognizes the best book(s) in Law and Society published in the previous year). The Jacob is the most prestigious book award that the Law and Society community offers; Raised Right was one of only 4 books total (out of a pool of 45) to be singled out for the 2018 award by the committee.
I have also since 2010 pursued opportunities to offer theoretical interventions into the Law and Society corpus more generally, and especially in the areas of legal mobilization and the “politics of rights.” Indeed, my contribution for a 2012 peer-reviewed issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society that honored the scholarly legacy of Stuart Scheingold revisited the patchwork quilt of studies that assess what Scheingold famously termed the “politics of rights.” My own previous scholarship was a part of this collection; but that scholarship (including my own) contains an unwarranted presumption that the simple engagement in rights mobilization is an inevitably empowering act, even if that rights claim does not meet with much obvious success. Thus I argued in “‘A Madman Full of Paranoid Guile’” that, as Scheingold had advised, scholars would do well to resist assigning an inevitably empowering character to a politics of rights and instead emphasize how such a politics can, under certain conditions and in certain contexts, instead work as a vehicle for alienation and estrangement.
Similarly, I was asked in 2014 by Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick to contribute to their overview of the whole of the Law and Society field: a peer-reviewed volume of essays authored by leading scholars that was entitled The Handbook of Law and Society. I was asked, in particular, to assess the state of rights scholarship. The resulting essay, a co-authored piece with Michael McCann and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller for which I was lead author, was entitled “The Past, Present, and Future of Rights Scholarship.” In it we recommended that rights scholars pay attention to, and organize their analyses around, the conceptual dynamics – the “who,” the “how,” and the “where” – that are common to rights movements across the globe.

[1] Paul M. Collins, Jr., “Reputational Rankings of Peer-Reviewed Law Journals: A Survey Approach.” 51 PS: Political Science & Politics 2, 383-384 (2018). I am pursuing a third track of post-tenure scholarship that examines the relations between law and popular culture. I am developing a book manuscript that links the increasingly anti-democratic and authoritarian American “politics of law and order” to our contemporary mania for superhero stories. The first article associated with this project explores these themes through an interrogation of popular culture portrayals of the relationship between Batman and Joker; it has passed peer review and been accepted for publication at Studies in Law, Politics, and Society. Moreover, the book manuscript has drawn significant early interest from Stanford University Press.

Teaching Narrative

Introduction
My promotion to Professor of Political Science in 2020 was, in part, recognition of how I have remained a committed and energetic teacher of both undergraduate and graduate students – one with an evolving, articulate pedagogy that has at once produced consistently high student teaching evaluations and helped to secure my graduate advisees both academic and non-academic careers. I have also over this time become a campus pioneer in online education, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. I have since 2012 worked closely with the course designers at UConn’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL)to adapt and deliver conventional undergraduate courses in online environments. More recently, Professor Stephen Dyson and I have worked with CETL Director Peter Diplock to develop a singular, highly innovative M.A. degree program in Politics and Popular Culture (PPC). This graduate program, which will be the only known program of its kind, will employ a hybrid style of teaching and mentoring that combines conventional face-to-face interaction in the classroom with emerging online technologies (such as Burning Glass and Kaltura) in order to reach an expansive audience of both traditional and non-traditional students.

Undergraduate Teaching
Although my teaching sits, as I have indicated, at the leading edge of emerging online technologies, my undergraduate pedagogy is decidedly “old school,” or throwback, in character. Indeed, I had by the time of my 2010 promotion grown unhappy with the way that my undergraduate teaching had devolved into an increasingly cinematic use of projected images and text (e.g., PowerPoint) and then the verbal recitation of that text. My experience was that, rather than engaging students in the course material, these projections instead fostered a passive learning environment in which students quickly scribbled down the projected text and then disengaged until the next slide appeared on screen. Moreover, I found that my students had become so fixated on the exact wording and sequencing of the projected text that it was impossible to depart at all from that text without invoking concern and anxiety. Perhaps my experience in this regard is singular; but I found the sort of uncritical usage of technology to which I had grown accustomed to be disabling; it was, I feared, preventing the sort of active learning and critical thinking that an education in the social sciences is meant to foster.
So in the Fall of 2010 I abandoned the use of PowerPoint and similar technologies entirely. I would teach exclusively from my notes (which I would not share), engage directly and consistently with as many students individually as possible, and ensure that my lectures were conversational and interactive in character. There would be no script handed out to the students, or projected, in advance; and we would work together to develop a highly-specific classroom environment that would resemble a learning community more than it would a conventional undergraduate course. To be sure, such an approach places unusual demands on students. They are forced to be actively engaged in each day’s discussions, especially since I have banned the use of laptops and other personal screens during class (excepting, of course, the use of such technologies by students with documented disabilities). Students develop and employ their critical analytic skills because they are required to consistently parse and paraphrase; and in the process they conceptually rework and orient the course material in ways that are congenial to their own learning styles and approaches. In other words, by ditching what had become my own uncritical reliance on screened technology (and by requiring students to do the same) and returning to a direct, personal engagement with both my course material and with my students I have been able to create an immersive, highly-gratifying classroom environment that develops exactly those qualities and skills that we all aspire to inculcate in our students: active, individualized engagement in learning that at once manifests, and reinforces, the critical thinking and writing skills so necessary for sustained academic and non-academic success. I don’t believe that it is a coincidence that since I have instituted these changes in my teaching methods I have received the best and most consistent teaching evaluations of my career. As the enclosed student evaluation of teaching (SET’s) forms indicate, I have since 2010 frequently scored above both CLAS and Political Science mean standards.
Ironically, my reconsideration of the use of technology in the classroom has led to a recalibration rather than a permanent abandonment. Indeed, getting back to basics has allowed me, over time, to much better understand how to successfully integrate advanced learning technologies into the core missions of higher education: the development of independent, critical thinkers and consumers of information who can meaningfully contribute to their communities. I now understand that technology must complement, rather than overshadow or replace, these core missions. And with the help of CETL, in particular, I have been able to do just this in both the undergraduate online courses that I teach (where I employ video chats, discussion forums, hand-graded assignments that I return electronically to students, and constant interaction to ensure an individualized learning environment) and in the PPC graduate program that Professor Dyson and I are in the advanced stages of developing (where we are enthusiastic partners in UConn’s ongoing investment in, and commitment to, the use of technology in teaching excellence).

Graduate Teaching
As is the case with many of my colleagues in the Department of Political Science, my time in the graduate classroom has, since 2010, become less frequent. The size of the department’s Ph.D. program has declined significantly over the last decade; graduate offerings have, accordingly, declined apace. Nevertheless, I have become during this time an even more deeply committed member of the graduate faculty, both for my own graduate advisees and for the department’s graduate student population writ large. As I indicate more fully in my service narrative, I have served as a member of the Graduate Affairs Committee consistently for the last decade and, even more directly, I have served for the last 6 years as the department’s inaugural (and still only) Graduate Admissions Coordinator. But it is undoubtedly in advising and overseeing the successful candidacies of Ph.D. candidates where I have made the greatest impact.
Indeed, I have since 2012 mentored 5 successful Ph.D. candidates as the primary advisor and an additional 3 as an associate advisor. 5 of these 8 candidates (and 3 of the 5 for whom I served as primary advisor) have gone on to successful long-term positions in the academy; each of the other 3 candidates have, following graduation, secured long-term employment outside of the academy. I am very proud of the successes that these students have enjoyed; and, given the deteriorating state of the job market in higher education, I am especially gratified by the academic placements.
Finally, as mentioned above, Professor Stephen Dyson and I have been heavily involved in transforming graduate education in the Department of Political Science through the development of a new M.A. program in Politics and Popular Culture that would at once complement other new proposed M.A. programs (such as the M.A. in Race and Ethnic Politics and the M.A. in Data Analysis) and supplement the Department’s existing Ph.D. curriculum. A unique, singular program that has no known competitors either in the United States or internationally, PPC is designed as a terminal 2-year program that will be delivered according to a mixed, hybrid teaching model that employs the considerable expertise and resources of CETL and UConn Career Services in order to present traditional and non-traditional students alike with the capabilities necessary to engage in our emerging information economy and society in robust, responsible, and meaningful ways. This program has been greeted with considerable excitement both within the UConn community and outside of it amongst interested audiences; and, along with the other proposed M.A. programs, PPC promises to grow our graduate student population and to afford significant new teaching and mentoring opportunities for Political Science faculty. Law, Politics, and Society
Law and Culture
American Political Thought